My son recently got into photography, and, as those things usually go, he started experimenting with film, since he heard all kinds of stuff on the Internet and wanted to check it out for himself. My reaction was “wait, film is actually still being used?” The last time I checked, Kodak went bankrupt and stopped producing film altogether, Fuji left the film market, and when I did my last experiment with film you could no longer get anyone to process E6 properly, and the best you could do was get some of the C41 emulsions that were still being produced (mostly Kodak Ektar and Portra and Fuji Reala), develop it in some rare places that still do it, and then either have it scanned in their Frontier minilab (to your detriment), or try to do it yourself, and good luck with that since film scanners were basically an extinct species at that point. Since the result of my experiment was that a 12MP m43 digital camera matched Mamiya 645 medium format with Fuji Reala negatives in resolution, and handily beat it in dynamic range and colour quality, I decided that film is not worth the hassle anymore, put the film gear in a drawer and thought that was it. However, it appears that the film market was having some kind of a resurgence – it’s mostly because of the motion pictures industry that started using it with some regularity again, and those C41 emulsions are being packaged in 35mm and medium format rolls, and black and white film was never much impacted by the move to digital. Also, there’s a surprising amount of activity around film, but when I looked into it, I was shocked that I couldn’t find good examples of film photography online anymore. Almost every example of pictures taken with film that I could find online looked like absolute garbage. I was like “that can’t be right, there has to be someone who shoots film because it’s beautiful”, but if there are such examples I couldn’t find them under the pile of all the hipster lomo garbage. I literally had to use my old film scans in order to show my son what film colours are supposed to look like when everything is done right – fresh film of good quality processed in good chemicals and scanned on a proper scanner. I literally couldn’t find an example of EBX online that isn’t cross-processed in C41 chemicals or developed in cat piss and scanned by a webcam or something, pretending it’s art. My first thought was “why do the film photographers put up with this”, but then I realized: they are actually actively looking for that, and when I saw a “film emulation” plugin for Lightroom that emulates the results of poor scanning, it became clear: people think film looks like shit, and they actively seek out this as a result, thinking it’s “nostalgic”. They actually want it to look washed out with colours that look like a result of age-fading for decades in some drawer. They don’t try to make film look good, because that look is perceived as “digital”. Not just that, but they are so obsessed with the “look”, that they completely neglect the photography itself, thinking that the “look” itself is somehow “art”, and when you look past the fact that the photo is taken on a poorly processed colour negative, there’s hardly anything there. A house, a street corner, a garage door. It’s all generic, stereotypical, vacuous and meaningless. Sure, most of everything used to be that way because most photographers used to follow trends and copy the things they saw somewhere without really understanding what made it good, but I think it’s even worse now, probably because poor results get applauded in some online echo-chamber and this amplifies the noise and kills the signal if there ever was any.

I continued to explore the technical part of what they are doing today, and found out that scanning, as expected, is a problem, because they are still using the same scanners that were current when I used to shoot film, but those are aging out of their life span and people are figuring out new methods, and the best one is to basically put film on a lightbox, and take a picture of it with a good digital camera with a macro lens. The detail captured is pretty much on par with film scanners, and the colours are in fact better. Then I asked myself the obvious question – why not just use the digital camera in the first place? And then it started dawning on me: that would be easy. That would skip over all those artificially introduced problems. It would reveal the fact that the photographer doesn’t actually know what he wants to do, has no ideas or goals in his work, and hides this under all the artificial problems created by using a completely fake technological process that pretends to be authentic, the way vinyl records mastered from digital files are a fake process pretending to be authentic.

Then I went deeper, trying to figure out why people create artificial problems for themselves and then whine as they solve them – it’s not just photography; I saw people heating their house with a wood stove or have an old car that keeps breaking down so that they have to fix it, and in general create all kinds of problems for themselves, and then solve those unnecessary problems in order to pretend that there’s something going on in their lives.

And there it is: they create fake problems for themselves because there is nothing else. The real problems are completely beyond their ability to solve, and the lack of smaller, solvable problems reveals the fact that their lives are empty and meaningless, and they are trying to bury this realization under all kinds of artificially created clutter.

Here’s where I really started thinking, because I remembered that experiment with a mouse utopia, where the scientists created an environment where mice will have absolutely everything they need, and the mice soon started acting in all kinds of dysfunctional and self-destructive ways, and their “civilization” collapsed in a very ugly way. The phenomenon became known as a behavioural sink, and humans seem to manifest the same patterns. When they lack obvious obstacles and problems to overcome in their daily lives, they reveal their existence as meaningless and start circling the drain.

Apparently, everybody needs to have a sense of a “mission”, a grand over-arching purpose of civilization and society, in which they partake by living their daily lives. If there’s no mission, and the problems they face daily are too easy and trivial, both mice and people go insane.

So, what’s the mission?

That’s an interesting question, because the same question seems to have contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire. The mission was initially obvious – Rome was threatened by the Gauls, by Carthage, by all kinds of powerful neighbours. However, as Rome grew stronger, all those threats were eliminated, and as there were no obvious threats, and there were centuries of peace, people had enough time to think about what was the whole point, and the answer was no longer apparent. People started doing all kinds of extreme stuff to fill the spiritual void created by the fact that there was no longer an obvious problem their existence was meant to solve.
This is why Christianity took over the Rome like a wildfire. Christianity introduced a new mission. The physical life is merely an entrance exam for the true life that is beyond it, and what we do in life is a choice for either God or vanity, for eternity or nothingness. This is a mission, an over-arching mission that saturated both civilization and individual lives with meaning, the same kind of mission that made the Egyptians build the pyramids. They probably thought they were building the mirror image of the Orion’s belt on Earth, and as such they were building a portal into the afterlife, merging Heaven and Earth. Similarly, the Christians of the “dark age” thought they were building Heaven on Earth, living the Augustinian God’s Kingdom on Earth. However, for some reason this sense of mission wore out, probably because they neglected the things of this world to the point where they were philosophically vulnerable to modernity and humanism, which pointed out that science should be applied to produce technologies that improve daily lives of people. At some point, modernism took over from religion, and the idea of conquering the world with science and technology and creating a modernist technological utopia became the dominant over-arching purpose.

This made complete sense when there were entire continents to be conquered and colonized, but we quickly ran out of those. Then we started “conquering” wastelands like Mt Everest and Antarctica, where “to conquer” no longer meant to go and live there, but to go in and out quickly before you die from hypoxia and hypothermia. “Conquering space” first meant to put something into orbit, then to put a man there for a few orbits, then to put a man on the Moon for a short period. However, the pattern soon started to emerge: space is even more hostile than the worst, most hostile and uninhabitable places on Earth. If you put a man in orbit for a year or so, his health degrades significantly. If you put a man on the Moon, radiation will quickly kill him, not to mention that there’s literally nothing there to sustain human life – it all needs to be brought from Earth, at great cost and literally zero benefit, because there’s nothing on the Moon. If Antarctica is undesirable as a place for human settlement, Moon is even more so; Antarctica at least has breathable atmosphere and radiation shielding. So, what’s there in space after the Moon? Mars? Let’s see: corrosive soil that is hostile to life, thin unbreathable atmosphere, no radiation shielding, already lost its atmosphere once to solar wind because it has no magnetosphere, and it’s even more expensive to get there than to the Moon. Also, there’s absolutely nothing there worth getting. What’s next? The satellites of the gas giants? Far from the Sun, so insufficient heat. Some have water. None have breathable atmosphere. Extremely hard and expensive to get to. Also, there’s nothing there.

Planets around other stars? Sure, if you have faster-than-light travel, but speed of light is very slow and it seems to be an insurmountable barrier for our technology. However, even if you get there, what evidence is there of places that are hospitable to human life? None. For all we know, the planets are all as inhospitable as Jupiter, Mars, Venus or the rocky bodies, and the star systems are mostly non-unary, which means stars orbiting the barycentre, often creating 3+ body problems of chaotic orbits, and squeezing each other tidally to produce extreme coronal mass ejections that sterilize the planets periodically. In order to realistically colonize something outside the Solar system, and not just go somewhere else to die, you’d need FTL travel that allows you to inspect a vast number of star systems quickly in order to filter out the inadequate ones. That’s completely beyond the reach of our technology, either now or in a foreseeable future.

Also, science fizzled out. It promised a lot, but the curve of progress flat-lined decades ago, and there’s nothing going on other than marketing for industry and politics, because science is currently a marketing brand rather than a method. Science no longer promises great things, and even if it does, people don’t really believe it.

So, let’s summarize this before it turns into another book. In the Ancient Egypt, the Grand Mission was to connect Heaven and Earth, to build a portal between the world of the living and the world of the dead. After that failed, their civilization fizzled out. With Rome, the Grand Mission was to build a huge empire to protect themselves and project their image upon the world. After that succeeded, everything felt empty and people tried to fill this emptiness with all kinds of crazy behaviours, until Christianity gave them another Grand Mission: create the world in the image of God, and choose an eternal afterlife in God. At some point, this fizzled out, and science offered the next Grand Mission: master the physical world, conquer the world, then the Solar System, then colonize the nearby star systems, and create a Galactic Empire, and maybe become Masters of the Universe. That went great until people landed on the Moon, but the next step never came, and as our space exploration atrophied, and our efforts turned to all kinds of navel-gazing, culminating with the Internet, people in general feel there’s no Grand Mission at all, no point to Everything, and thus no point to anything, and if they face this outright, they go insane like the mice in their behavioural sink utopia. And so, in order not to go crazy, they create fake problems for themselves, like living in some wasteland on primitive resources in order to keep themselves busy with survival despite not needing to, or doing photography with film, or maintaining an oldtimer car that keeps breaking down, or doing Christmas every year, where they pretend it’s something meaningful to do, spend all the money, get annoyed by the family and relatives, get fat from too much food and hung over from too much alcohol, and depressed in early January when all that shit passes and they are left with more debt, more lard on their arse, and meaninglessness of their lives staring at them from the abyss of the future. So, what do they do? Invent fake goals, create non-existent problems that require fixing, and make everything worse so that they could feel they have a purpose in making things better again.

There’s obviously a real problem underneath all the dysfunction, and it needs to be addressed, not just covered up with pointless nonsense. To me, the answer is obvious. The purpose and the point of our existence is not in this world, it’s on the other side. If this life is to have a purpose at all, it is to get to the other side safely, without leaving pieces behind, and by choosing the right kind of spiritual existence for ourselves, the kind we would actually want to have forever. St. Augustine was right all along; it’s just that people got side-tracked by materialism, which hijacked science and turned it into a false theology. God is still the Eternity which we are trying to reach, by following the Ariadne’s thread of God’s presence through the labyrinth of the world. That is the Way, for both the civilisation, and the individual person.